‘Who’s’ that Girl?

Clarity on Clara

Everything about Clara is repeated. Not just phrases and names, but repeated numbers, repeated words, colours (red) and flowers (roses) and items (like the umbrella). Look for them. They’re there. Or try Pinterest. Some suggest Clara is the daughter of the Doctor and Rose from Pete’s World. Others say she could be the Doctor’s cloned daughter. Or she’s a meme. Maybe he is meeting the embodied Tardis at a different point in the life of the Tardis (which explains why Clara and the Tardis don’t get along – nobody much likes themselves do they?) or an embodiment of Time, or an eternal and forgetful incarnate spirit of mischief, or a relative/descendent of his granddaughter (which he did mention).  Sometimes he does seem, I don’t know, grandfatherly towards her, which is a magnificent achievement in acting for Matt Smith, who’s all of 30. Pretty soon I guess we will know (or think we will know).

Theories: we have them.

Echoes in Time

The entire series has felt a little like events happening are like events of the past. The texture of the episodes feels a bit 1970s, (even when they are not actually in the ’70s). And there’s the familiarity. For example, there has been an Exploding Tardis (like at the end of the first series featuring the Ponds), there’s been a near-accident in an aircraft (like with the Pond’s honeymoon, or the Spaceship Titanic), the Great Intelligence in the wifi is akin to the Wire in the TV signal. Clara sees the birth and the death of Earth (not quite like Rose did) but still. The sub was a little like the Sanctuary Base, where the Doctor and Rose were stuck, without an escape, against a wily foe, and needing a lift. I’m not saying the story-well is running dry, it’s more like, someone is reading a book of the Doctor and making new stories from the bones of the old ones.

So, from all of the above, and in my continuing quest to link writing to Dr Who, it almost feels like something is pulling the strings of the Doctor; Clara makes this plain, she complains about the ‘story’ when she punches him over the Zombies. And of all the companions she shows us the library and the History of the Time War book, which she can read, which means the Tardis is translating Gallifreyan.  So it wants to be read?

And what of the logic flaws in some of the episodes? Could these be entirely deliberate (collapsing sun not destroying the rings of Akhaten; the rocket not burning everyone in the tower in Yorkshire etc). Are all of these clues? Surely not burning is related to how Clara both did and didn’t burn in the heart of the Tardis? And to the colour red? The other clue is the book by Amelia Williams. All her stories were framed using her narration and the absence of Amy remains, as a different kind of frame. Clara doesn’t get to introduce each episode. Neither did any other companion. Only Amy and although she may not appear in any particular episode, she might be the one influencing it. The Ghost of Amy, could symbolise, I don’t know, the Author in the Machine. If you want. Maybe?

The other thing is these are the stuff we are noticing. So how much is being embedded in each episode that we will look back on later and go aha?

Listen to the beat, two, three, four, eleven…

Whoever was responsible for the playing of The Cult’s Fire Woman (Moff was that your choice?) in the Tardis episode is worth solid gold. Awesome episode clue, or big seasonal arc clue? Like like Hungry Like the Wolf in the sub episode? Maybe.

Infinite Probability Drivers

Also loved entering the Tardis. This is the kind of thing I dreamed of as a kid. A forever infinite ship. An adventure in itself, full of old props  items from his pasts, yet strangely missing one crucial one, in the mystery of the missing hat/umbrella stand as in the episode called Hide. I duly noted, and loved, the shout out to Silence in the Library with the Fiction Mist too. Some see it as a flaw, how Clara happened on the one book and the one page in all the library with the Doctor’s name, but who says it was an accident? As above about writing, does the Moff have accidents as a writer? Really, we know the Tardis can be capricious, can rearrange rooms, so I bet it can rearrange the catalogue and location of books. And if not the Tardis then something else. Nothing happens to Clara without a purpose, although I’m not the biggest fan of a reset, but isn’t Clara one big continuing reset? And at least the Doctor and the audience got a little further in understanding what’s going on. Anyway, as the Doctor asks, have some trust. That’s the central issue, for the Doctor regarding Clara, and for the people who follow his story, trust. Don’t feed the writer. Trust the writer, he loves this world too.

Cookie Cutter Hero = Boring

Some on the interwebz are remarking how the Doctor seems a bit nasty, especially in the episodes with the dinosaurs and in Journey to the Centre of the Tardis. That’s because he is a bit nasty. He’s not some Hollywood cardboard cut out two a penny plastic Hero, he’s a 1000 years old and done terrible things and survived terrible things and lost almost everything and everyone. Wouldn’t we all bit a bit nasty after all that? So expect damage! Expect, sometimes, he may want to square an impossible ledger. But further than this, he is not human. As a character, he sees through time. From a linear progressive time line some of his decisions seem cruel or unhelpful, but his perspective is closer to omniscient, so as the story goes along for us (or Clara) only he sees how things end up, or could end up, and how they can be unwound (or not as the case maybe – ie the Ponds). He doesn’t mourn the brothers when they die because he’s already apologised to them for making them ‘toast’, and probably knows he can change everything anyway. Plus, they’re in the middle of an emergency. No point expressing feelings if you’re gonna die doing it, instead of making an escape and/or saving the day. It’s about priorities.

Fingers on lips!

Secrets! Wanting something and not having it is a wonderful driver in a story. Not wanting something and fearing it’s arrival is also a fine motivator for fans of Dr Who. I mean a quick hands up on who wants to know the Doctor’s name? Anyone? Nup. Me neither. I’m fine with that mystery because a lil mystery is part of the allure. Not seeing every room on the Tardis allows us to dream of the possibilities, while seeing some of them is woohoo! Now we know (if the Doctor isn’t lying) that the Tardis is infinite. So we can keep imagining. Yay! So the fear is, that in finding out the Doctor’s name and realising it’s Fred reduces it to some mundane boring thing, and I get enough of the mundane in my real life, without it infecting fiction.

Eternal verities & Fairy Tales

The *in* thing

So, there’s Once Upon a Time, Red Riding Hood, Tangled, Snow White and the Huntsman and now Hansel and Gretel. Fairy tales are in. But fairy tales were always the in thing. There are feminist takes and post modern re-tellings and grunge and hyper-homogenised commercial versions. All worthwhile. And there’s plenty to say about ‘em, even these. Yet few focus attention on the spiritual dimensions of Fairy Tales. That’s ok in a way, because the very nature of these stories is that they can be anything to anyone. They are rich.

However, we are poor if we don’t make the effort to see their spiritual power. I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about the power of story telling to say what we are and how we can know it. It is this aspect of Fairy Tales that I learnt in the first year of my degree too many years ago to recall in full. And it seems too few are getting the education I was privileged to obtain. So here goes.

What fairy tales are

I’ve said this before, but Fairy Tales are wisdom, delivered orally, (mainly) by wise women, to their communities. Each generation hands this wisdom down to the next. Elements change, but their importance doesn’t. Primarily, they communicate(d) knowledge of cosmological significance, about the development of the soul and the soul’s place in the cosmos. They were ideal teaching tools because they could be re-crafted for particular audiences, remembered with ease and, for each listener, what they understood of them was dependent upon their personal spiritual growth and morality as a member of the community. These stories were not especially meant for children, but also, they weren’t not meant for them – spiritually evolved children understood exactly what they were about.

Ye Olde Fairy Tale

What, metaphysically, do these stories show us? Firstly they demonstrate that this world, as any scientitian will say, is not just what you can see. There is the realm of the ascendant or knowledge, or light, heaven or truth, there is the every day fluxy world of time and change and there is the underworld, a realm of death and decay, secrets and darkness.  These tales show us there is the world of ignorance, the world of learning and the world of the awakened. Each have their merits and lessons, and each is a state of being. Each story reveals ways to navigate between these realms, which is nothing short of how to navigate life and death.

Who?

There are beings that inhabit every realm. Some move between all three worlds. They are either like Hermes – divine beings, or guides, or tricksters who have other goals than merely helping humans. There are beings of truth, there are beings of shadow and there are those who are concerned about humans and those who are not. Then there are special humans who attain wisdom or an ability who can also visit each of these realms, they are shamans, guides, god-mothers, witches, the old and wise or gifted or gravely ill or very young. Sometimes they help others (shamans) sometimes they can travel just for themselves. And finally there are the humans who undergo – Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White – they are us.

Why the need?

Change is a natural constant in all life, so humans need ways to deal with it, but, like butterflies, the story of change is not what you think it is. Each story deals in some way with transformation – from ignorance to becoming to being. Fairy Tales do this using the language of symbols and metaphor, where this journey of the soul can be presented as  from Ugly Physical Duckling to the awareness of self as Realised Spiritual Swan.  These Fairy Tales are also ways of providing what we need to cope and learn about all sorts of change, whether that the physical changes such as puberty or death or social states like marriage, or mental states. They can help us accept our destiny as individuals caught up in change, but also as Spirit, which is beyond change.

Symbolism

Stories are their most useful when they use metaphor because they are flexible, can travel and appeal to the human imagination. Humans like working things out, multiplicity and can’t resist mystery but always appreciate meaning. So it is a sad development of the modern world that so many can’t appreciate multiple levels of meaning in stories. Ancient story tellers didn’t use literalism. Poetry, song, myth and tales are the province of multiple meanings and interpretations because that is who we are. Every human is a complex player in their own life – daughter, lover, writer, worker. Just so, every story is layered.  Skilled teachers have multiple strategies to deliver each lesson, the same goes for stories. As a side note, please don’t reduce stories – don’t reduce people – to one narrow literal interpretation.

Let’s get specific

Let’s take wolves and bears. They are night creatures or animals that hibernate and thus belong to the darkness, which is night-time, the absence of awareness of the transcendent, and also the underworld. They are not necessarily evil. As the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Myth of Ishtar suggest, no one can visit the underworld and be unchanged by it, in fact, such visits also transform the world. Wolves encourage us to face our inner void, they are not just about the carnality of nature, of raw physicality, but about the body’s ultimate destiny as a thing doomed to decay. Yet in visiting the night realm, we are reminded that the sleeping wake and that even Persephone and Ishtar return to the world with the spring, and being thus awake, awaken the world, as avatars/Bodhisattvas. The point is that there is a return journey, and perhaps the ultimate darkness (death) is another phase a being undergoes.

Wolves also speak to humanity as beings who form communities but can also live alone, as such, they are metaphors of the soul’s search for its home among it’s like. Furthermore the lone wolf and the lone woodsman are redolent of community fears about ‘the otherness’ of strangers, thus, they represent the special otherness beyond the everyday world – the otherness souls feel when embodied – or the conviction this physical world is not the only one. The uninitiated (asleep) fear them as they fear what they have yet to experience. Bears, again, are seasonal creatures and cave dwellers. Night and the cave can be viewed as symbolic of the womb – the mystery of life that forms (sleeps) in darkness, which again is a symbol of the spiritual journey from night (Plato’s Cave of Shadows plays with this idea) into knowledge and hence into light. In this, darkness is not evil, but necessary, we can’t be born into the human world except through darkness and seems to indicate the same at the end of life. Fairy Tales imbue the natural world with meaning and use the natural world, because we forget now, but used to know, that humans are a part of the natural world and are animals caught within its cycles of birth, life, death and decay.

Myth

I’m not saying anything new here. Every person moved by a story beyond the obvious emotionality of it senses this somehow. And all the Myths we are familiar with? I don’t deny aspects of their possible historicity (ie Euhemerism) - but this only demonstrates an earlier point – humans make stories to bring meaning to events. It’s what we do.

Anyway Myths are stories made large, and while we love our Heroes and their Dragon Slaying Dramas, the Fairy Story speaks to us on a level that make the domestic Heroic and recognises that the everyday world poses dangers and challenges to the soul’s journey. 

I’ll explain this again. The differences between Myth and Fairy Tale are mostly of scale and use. The great task to slay a dragon and become King is epic, it can be presented on a stage and styled for an enactment in honour of the Gods in their temples – they are for ‘holy days’. Fairy Tales, in a way, are more important, because, with their stories about kids collecting fire wood (for example) they use commonplace examples that demonstrate our Quest in Becoming happens every day in all sorts of circumstances and each of us mere average mortals is the Hero/Heroine of our own journey.

Suck it and see

Don’t take my word for it. Read the stories with eyes open for symbols. See a ladder or a tree? They are conduits between spiritual stages. See that coal or slipper or animal, think about everything they are associated with and their function. Everything means something and something and something else.

What others say

Again. Don’t take my word for it. Read what others have said about Myth and Fairy Tales. They are not the ‘lies breathed through silver’ that CS Lewis was so dismissive of. So I recommend..

The White Goddess, Robert Graves, not because he is always accurate, but because of the spirit of his inquiry and revelation.

Anything by Joseph Campbell – because really.

Jung. Because he kinda gets it.

Mircea Eliade. Because knowledge.

The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard.

Read poetry. Look at art.

Read Novalis, or if not, try Tolkien and Borges or Herman Hesse.

Finally, a message to my lecturers from back when. If I forget everything else, I won’t forget the things you helped me remember, and in my writing my goal is always to demonstrate this. With much fondness to Long Ago and Ever After.

Waiting for the change

Act One.

There are some afternoons, interminably long summer ones, where the lower horizon shows Melbourne’s distant hills in a smudged, faded-denim blue, and just above that there forms a band of frayed brown or burnt sienna. On such days people are cranky and suspicious. Lawns crunch and the sun glares down and down so everything is baked hard and unrelenting: nerves, patience, the very soil. It’s easy to believe the infinite universe is offended. Trees and power lines wilt in unison. Meanwhile, scent has been broiled out of the atmosphere so that the brown air could be smoke or city smog or northern red dirt blown to holiday on the coast from 1000 miles in land. One is never sure and it’s too hot to argue. Beyond the traffic snarls and buckling train tracks, the suburbs are hushed. Tense. Waiting for the sun to sink from the bleached sky to below the haze into a cooler evening. There is waiting for the southerly. There is waiting for the news. Waiting especially for good news: all is well. All is safe. 

Act Two.

The change. Overnight – or just before dawn – the winds shift and desert dust blooms into an ocean breeze. In the alps, there is the hint of snow, even snow, but in the city, streets become corridors for gusts lifting up the dirt and rubbish only for it to settle further out, coating the houses as far as you can see. Along with the rain’s dirty blatter, there’s relief, and perhaps a casual disregard as roads turn treacherous as morning dew mingles with the deposited grime to make them slippery. By mid morning it’s sunny and exiled smokers  shiver again in the shadows of office towers. By lunch the heat is forgotten.

Act Three.

Another front. More fears. Talk of intensity, electricity and checks on the elderly. Warning signs and containment lines. So it goes. So it goes into Autumn. 

Working out what it all means

Writing is adopting wabi and sabi while using both matiere and san. And working out what they mean.

Dr Who: Book Ends

Steven Moffat. So very, very clever. He made Dr Who into a fairy story or, if you like, a myth, but not about the ever-continuing adventures of a mad man with a box, no. It’s a parable about writing, which is a metaphor about life and memory. At the end of this latest series or season or arc, he has killed his darlings, as every writer must. Much like Cabin in the Woods (see earlier posts) was about the writer as creator so too Moffat has used the stories of River, Amy and Rory to reflect on writing and life.

Anyway the Moff once said about The Library that the Doctor gave River Song the run of all human history and literature as a retirement plan. He has given Amy (and Rory) something similar. Of all the series since Amy Pond arrived she has been the narrator of each episode, introducing each adventure, but in those gaps between each adventure she becomes (eventually) a travel writer and a publisher. And like her mother, River Song becomes the writer of her parent’s adventure with the Doctor in a book The Angel’s Kiss (under the name Melody Malone). Her daughter Melody/River is also the diarist of her own search for The Doctor. River and Amy are stories, those lives that for The Doctor ‘flare and fade’ but whose chapters are muddled. The audience sees their lives mostly from the Doctor’s perspective, like him we dip in and out like opening books in the middle and end before reading the start. Moffat even makes this obvious, by having say the Doctor never reads the last page. Thus the audience sees River die before she was born, we see her as a Professor before she was a Doctor and see Amy and Rory, her parents, greet her as an adult weeks after she was born and River’s own parents meet their child as an adult before they realise they grew up with her or that they will become parents. (My question as a writer is, do the scriptwriters have a special grammar?) After such temporal confusion it is right that the passing of both Amy and River are book-ended, literally and metaphorically.

How soon does the book close?

For River the Doctor leaves her Diary in the Library, because he knows it contains his future and for all his travels he can’t read ahead on his personal timeline. For Amy he reads finally reads the last page of The Angel’s Kiss when he realises it is Amy’s last message to him. It completes her story and it closes the book on Amy.

These ends are as difficult and as touching as any. Like every character in books all of them have died, but remain alive on the page (or super computer hard drive) and in our memories. They are trapped in existences and world’s that are mostly beyond the Doctor but each managed to fulfil their dreams, mostly. Again, just like any well-drawn character confined to the bounds of a page or story.

And yet the story continues, River has just lost her parents and is free, but refuses to travel with The Doctor (fans know this, she is not the new companion). The audience  too, has skipped ahead and know her end. Only now we can see her moving towards it: she has been released from the Storm Cage and is now a Professor. I continue to hope she has much more to do before her book closes.

And there is the new companion. Someone we have seen who rewrote the history books on the Doctor’s greatest enemy and died a hero. Much props to Moff for endearing the audience to a new companion before she properly arrives and for (again maybe) somehow killing her before we really get to know her. Unless, of course, it isn’t her.

Shelf Life: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams stole all my best lines…says everyone…probably. He managed to define so much, so succinctly, about the world, about people, that there is little I can say to add to how well he managed it. Except, being a contrary sort, I will anyway.

I was in primary school, and as my brothers, my mum and me all waited in the car at the end of our (very long) drive way for the bus to come, every morning that music would play and I would yell at everyone to shut up because the funny was on. At least I like to think this. We probably all waited with bated breath.  It was a long time ago.

It was maybe while I was in grade three. The radio series was in its nth repeat and I didn’t care. Which means I was still not yet reading or writing, but dammit I was going to listen. It opened up the universe to me. If Dr Who (as it turns out Adams’ version) had opened the past (mostly 1970s versions of 19th century Sherlockian Gothic goings on with alien Egyptians and the like), then Douglas Adams’ radio thing was presenting a present-future that seemed both frustratingly familiar and positively alarmingly amazing. Like most of the TV I was watching it helped define Britishness for me. I didn’t know why this was important, living as I did 500kms from the nearest decent pizza city in rural South Australia, but who was I to argue?

Hitchhiker’s demonstrated that sometimes just existing is contrary to every will in the universe, and this was OK. All I knew then, was that as a contrary kid I was all right too because, despite all the grumbling about the lack of tea, Arthur was OK and he had just lost his entire planet. Who was I to grumble? There was plenty of tea (I didn’t drink tea) and compared to intergalactic homelessness what was the big deal about not reading or writing and only painting whole sheets of butcher’s paper one colour? Come on – stick figures are so bourgeois.

What was I saying? Hitchhikers. I re-watched the TV series in the mid 1990s when I could (finally) rent the tapes. It was…disappointing and slow. All the jokes were there and the cast but the pace and timing were flat. My heart was a little bit broken because it failed to match my memories. But I always loved the books. Ever since I found them in the school/town library in that first year of high school.

The thing about now is how much it is like the world imagined by Adams. Got a smart phone? Then you’ve got that encyclopedia/guide in your pocket. Plus the endless bureaucrazy that technology has enabled rather than replaced. Reporters and pundits spend endless hours speculating about the news tomorrow while robots are cleaning houses and mice with human ears growing on their backs do experiments.

So I have the series, but haven’t read them for a while. I did see the film. It wasn’t bad. Martin Freeman looked appropriately battered, frustrated and English, Sam Rockwell was OK (he’s done better recently) and everyone else was yeah.  Alan Rickman did depressed well enough as Marvin, but overall the film lacked something or had too much of something else. Urgency maybe, or perhaps it was too familiar and not familiar enough. Thing is, the radio show and books, (the game, the towel, the musical etc) have so permeated the culture the film felt a bit like it was sending it up, not recreating it. It had come late to the party, but the party had moved on.

Thing is, it got me thinking about philosophical questions before I knew what philosophy was. Somehow it all seeped in and once you get it, you get it. But as Arthur, Ford and Zaphod demonstrate it’s perfectly all right not to get it, we’re all trapped in the whole sort of general mish mash.

Some get it whenever they spy a certain number, and nod their heads sagely. As do writers of TV shows and films, like the X Files, The Avengers, The Kumars, Lost, Dr Who and Sherlock and so on.

The Door to Perception

Fans admit there are flaws. All sorts of things don’t sit as comfortably as they might have but a major one how long Adams takes to get to a decent role for female characters. It does read like a ‘boy’s own adventure’ and Trillian could have been awesome from the start but was a play on words joke and her character took forever to come to the fore. Fenchurch similarly started as the same kind of joke and a call back to a throw away aside, but became so much more and then psszt gone. I always felt robbed by her absence, but understood it in terms of putting Arthur through stuff.

On the positive side anyone who doesn’t understand the concept of voice should read the books or even listen to the radio episodes. It’s fair to say Adams’ voice can be imitated (never did finish the Eoin Colfer book) and for sure I think his rhythms and language logic continue to influence me (along with legions of others).

Favourite Character: Ford Prefect (most of the time, depending on mood).

On Writing, analogies and um, writing

Been a bit quiet of late here, I make to no apologies since this a blog, not a cure for cancer. But if you want explanations, there’s been life, study and assignment deadlines, work and the odd random visit to hospital. As you do. Anyway, none of the above have stopped me from writing and thinking about writing and other stuff either. So here you go.

There’s terrible dangers for writers, or perhaps, just for me. The danger of comparison, of competition and judgement. As much as the achievements of others energise me, I admit they can also be a drain. I don’t know, it’s not quite jealousy or defeat, sort of an ennui where I’m irritated not by their works so much as by my failures, perceived or real. And an idea that I’m running out of time.

Obviously these are flaws.

Sometimes the achievements of others blinds me to everything worthy in what I have done until all I see are just tiny bits of average. I admit to reading the ‘winning’ stories or published stories and not seeing how they stood out from the crowd or stood above what I did. Other times I can see exactly what I needed to do with a story, about 10 minutes after an editor suggests something like moving the last sentence to the title (or some such).

So you see writing is full of pettiness, loneliness and doubt. Or maybe, again, that’s just me. If I was an opal miner in some outback spot, just digging away in the dim quiet of a mine shaft at least I would understand that if I produced opals people would value them, pay for them. Of course if I was an opal miner who just dug up dirt then…whatever, I’m tired so it’s finish your own analogy day here.

Sorry, what I’m trying to say is that writing is like being down the mine shaft and its difficult to know if  you’ve got opals or fool’s gold. Or something.

Furthermore, I write to, quite literally, please myself and sometimes I question whether my own critical faculties are up to ensuring what I write is any good. And yet I also write to be read, which is why those moments when an email or even letter arrives confirming Magical Publication feel like my entire existence is vindicated. For a moment acceptance is proof of ability, confirmation of self-worth and justification of everything.  But, like a drug, eventually the elation of publication and even positive reception, wears off. I return to the coal face/opal mine of writing and submitting and wait full of trepidation, for another hit. I imagine these hypothetical drugged opal miners have a bucket load of problems. Anyhoo.

Perhaps I put too much into the idea of publication, too much pressure on myself.  I’m lucky to have been published at all given the immense competition out there and how little I do write.

And the sad glorious thing is even though I’m aware of this, even though I know writing hasn’t made me a fortune and has probably cost me more than I’ve ever made, I continue. I continue in much the same way as Gatsby, probably, foolishly trying to capture the future where, both of us, Gatsby and me, will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past analogous remote opal mine of writing.

Damn, should’ve started with Gatsby and gone with another simile. Too late.

Anyhow, now you’re here, you can go visit these cos they might be lonely:

A Vigil on Lucy’s Night at Danse Macabre Du Jour

And this one here

There’ll Be Nothing Left, Except My Shoes at Extract(s)